The present invention relates to three-dimensional digitizer for digitizing the surface contour of a solid body. Such digitizers are used in a number of applications, for example in connection with numerical-control (NC) machine tools to reproduce the surface contour of the solid body measured.
A number of three-dimensional digitizers are known for this purpose. Generally, such digitizers include a probe or stylus which is movable along each of the three orthogonal axes (i.e., the X-axis, Y-axis, and Z-axis) with respect to the solid body, so as to determine the three coordinates of each of the sample points on the surface of the respective solid body. Such known digitizers, however, are relatively complicated and bulky in construction.